News¶

LXD 5.12 has been released¶

20th of March 2023

Introduction¶

The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 5.12!

This release contains a LOT of fixes, especially around storage and instance migration.
On top of all those fixes, it also contains three small but rather useful new features.

Enjoy!

New features and highlights¶

Device wipe when creating storage pools¶

It's now possible to instruct LXD to wipe the source device of a storage pool prior to creation. This should be used with extreme care as setting the wrong source value will cause the disk in question to have its header wiped clean by LXD.

This was added for use by MicroCloud where all of the disks are accounted for and this can be safely performed. For other use cases, you'll want to make sure that there can't possibly be useful data on the disk prior to using this.

To use it, just set source.wipe=true at storage pool creation time.

VM generation id¶

LXD now implements VM generation IDs.

This is a feature available on x86_64 VMs which has LXD expose a UUID that the guest can consume and compare with the UUID used at boot time. Any change in value will indicate that the guest has been restored to a former state and that sensitive cryptographic functions like the random number generator should be seeded again.

On LXD, the initial value of the generation ID will be the same as the VM UUID.
The generation ID will follow the same reset rules as the VM UUID with the exception that a snapshot restore will also trigger a generation ID reset whereas the instance UUID will be kept the same.

For users, there's really nothing to do about this, it's purely an additional security feature that the guest OS may or may not use. As a result, this is done by default for all LXD VMs on architectures that support it (currently x86_64 only).

VM block cache mode¶

A new disk device configuration option, io.cache has been introduced.
This option can be used to control the caching behavior for the disk in virtual machines.

The default value (none) will have LXD configure no caching and setup the use of Direct I/O when supported by the underlying storage pool. An alternative is to use writeback which will cache writes, flushing them to the backing pool when the guest sends a flush request. The last option is unsafe which works the same as writeback but ignores guest requests to flush the cache to disk.

Complete changelog¶

Here is a complete list of all changes in this release:

Try it for yourself¶

This new LXD release is already available for you to try on our demo service.

Downloads¶

The release tarballs can be found on our download page.

Binary builds are also available for:

• Linux: snap install lxd
• MacOS: brew install lxc
• Windows: choco install lxc

LXD 5.11 has been released¶

17th of February 2023

Introduction¶

The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 5.11!

This is a pretty packed release with a couple of big highlight features, specifically the instance placement scriptlet and ZFS zvol support but also included are quite a few other smaller features, performance improvements and bugfixes.

Enjoy!

New features and highlights¶

Instance placement scriptlet¶

A common request from cluster users has been to provide a better alternative to LXD's default placement algorithm.

By default LXD will quite simply look at all suitable cluster members and select whichever is currently hosting the fewest instances. It doesn't care about whether they're containers or VMs, whether they're currently running or not, how much resources the same may have and how much of it may be in use at the time.

As there are about as many opinions on placement as there are clusters out there, we decided to go with something that's both very flexible, yet very fast and reliable.
Instead of a potentially pretty complex internal scheduler which may not fit everyone's needs or an external scheduler which can go down, we went with something that's new for LXD.

Enter scriptlets. Scriptlets as the name may suggest are little scripts.
In LXD's case, we're using Starlark scripts specifically which is a very limited dialect of Python. Those scripts are directly loaded into the application, in this case LXD and can be provided with some data and functions to call.

Pretty importantly, those scriptlets cannot access any local data, hit the network or even perform complex time consuming actions (no loops and the like).

In LXD's case, we're introducing a new config key, instances.placement.scriptlet which can be set to a Starlark scriptlet. Then whenever LXD needs to place an instance, it will call that scriptlet, provide it with a list of candidate cluster members, the instance creation request itself and expose some functions that can be used to retrieve additional information about cluster members.

Specification: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxd-scriptlet-based-instance-placement-scheduler/15728
Documentation: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/explanation/clustering/#instance-placement-scriptlet

Block storage mode on ZFS pools¶

Something that was requested over 5 years ago now but recently caught our attention thanks to Docker and Android is the interest for using ZFS as a storage backend but not store data within ZFS datasets but rather use ZFS volumes.

This leads to an experience that's very similar to LVM or Ceph but on the very capable ZFS backend. It can also be used to mix and match, having some specific custom volumes use zvol while the rest of the data uses datasets.

This is interesting for both Android containers and for Docker storage as in both cases, ZFS isn't compatible with the way they expect to store data. With this feature it's now possible to flip the storage mode to zvol for Android containers, getting them running on the expected ext4 filesystem, and for Docker, one can now carve out a custom storage volume that's formatted as ext4 for use as /var/lib/docker, allowing for the use of the much faster overlay2 vfs driver.

Specification: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxd-zfs-block-mode/15872
Documentation: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/reference/storage_zfs/#storage-volume-configuration

lxc cluster info command¶

As part of the placement scriptlet work described above, one thing we needed was for an easy way to retrieve load information about a cluster member.

Rather than only having this available as an internal function, we decided to also make it available over the API and provide a CLI command for it.

stgraber@dakara:~$ lxc cluster info s-shf-cluster:athos
sysinfo:
  uptime: 30219
  load_averages:
  - 12.13
  - 9.77
  - 9.62
  total_ram: 676309450752
  free_ram: 319631790080
  shared_ram: 123550392320
  buffered_ram: 32219648000
  total_swap: 8589926400
  free_swap: 8589926400
  processes: 4330
storage_pools:
  hdd:
    space:
      used: 23882062033615
      total: 30893314601679
  ssd:
    space:
      used: 2452640672159
      total: 10217284610463

It provides pretty raw data about the system load, memory and disk usage and number of processes.

Support for attaching managed physical networks to instances¶

physical managed LXD networks were first introduced to serve as uplink for OVN networks. But seeing how LXD also supports attaching to physical network interfaces, there was no good reason not to allow their use through the network property.

Documentation: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/reference/devices_nic/#nic-physical

Reworked image documentation¶

Continuing with our documentation rework, in this release we now have the images documentation re-organized to match the rest of our docs.

https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/images/

Complete changelog¶

Here is a complete list of all changes in this release:

Try it for yourself¶

This new LXD release is already available for you to try on our demo service.

Downloads¶

The release tarballs can be found on our download page.

Binary builds are also available for:

• Linux: snap install lxd
• MacOS: brew install lxc
• Windows: choco install lxc

LXD 5.0.2 LTS has been released¶

20th of January 2023

Introduction¶

The LXD team is pleased to announce the release of LXD 5.0.2!

This is the second bugfix release for LXD 5.0 which is supported until June 2027.

Bugfixes and improvements¶

This release includes a couple of months worth of bugfixes and minor improvements from the development branch.

Some of the highlights include:
- Support for cluster token expiry
- Support for remote token expiry
- Extended image filtering in the CLI
- Support for overriding the devices list during lxc init and lxc launch
- Support for restricting a project to a set of networks
- Support for VM CPU hotplug

As usual, all of those are considered to be minor usability improvements or relevant to LXD's security. Major features such as those requiring data migration or database changes are never backported as part of an LTS point release.

The full list of commits is available below:

Try it for yourself¶

Try the latest LXD release on our demo service.

Downloads¶

The release tarballs can be found on our download page.

Binary builds are also available for:

• Linux: snap install lxd
• MacOS: brew install lxc
• Windows: choco install lxc

LXD 5.10 has been released¶

13th of January 2023

Introduction¶

The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 5.10!

As our first release of 2023, this is a bit of a lighter one as the team has been enjoying a two weeks break for the holidays. Next month's release is going to be where we see some of the larger new features of 2023 start landing.

That's not to say that LXD 5.10 is boring. Besides a continued push to get the most performance out of our database and preparatory work for upcoming features, this still manages to introduce some quality of life improvements and a good number of bugfixes.

Enjoy!

New features and highlights¶

Reworked instance documentation¶

The instance documentation has now been re-structured to match the new style of our documentation. This means separate pages for instructions on performing common actions as well as separate pages for the various device types.

This makes it all easier to navigate as well as significantly easier to link to.

Documentation: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/instances/

Reworked server documentation¶

The server documentation has also seen some initial re-organization happening to it.
There's still more to come in that area as we work towards cleaning up the Manage LXD section of the documentation, but in this release you can already see a better structured main page with clean sub-sections and navigation.

Documentation: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/server/

Network pie charts in the Grafana dashboard¶

Our Grafana dashboard is a great way to identify your top instances.
Up until now, we had charts covering the top 5 instances for CPU, memory and disk.

By user request, we have now extended that to also cover network usage with 4 new charts covering top transmit traffic, top receive traffic as well as top transmit packets and top receive packages.

As a reminder, our dashboard can be either downloaded directly from the LXD source repository at https://github.com/lxc/lxd/blob/master/grafana/LXD.json

Or it can be retrieved from Grafana directly (ID 15726): https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/15726-lxd/

Configurable network transmit queue length on NIC devices¶

A new queue.tx.length setting is now available for veth-based nic devices.
This means it's limited to containers using one of bridged, p2p or routed nic types.

This new configuration key allows for setting the txqueuelen setting on the network interface. This can be useful when encountering latency issues that are related to packet queuing and can be used to either decrease the queue length forcing a lower latency behavior or on the contrary, increasing the queue length to try to increase throughput.

Complete changelog¶

Here is a complete list of all changes in this release:

Try it for yourself¶

This new LXD release is already available for you to try on our demo service.

Downloads¶

The release tarballs can be found on our download page.

Binary builds are also available for:

• Linux: snap install lxd
• MacOS: brew install lxc
• Windows: choco install lxc

LXD 5.9 has been released¶

12th of December 2022

Introduction¶

The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 5.9!

This is going to be our last release of 2022.
We wish you all happy holidays and look forward to seeing you all in 2023!

As the last release of the year, this was also a shortened development cycle of just three weeks, most of which was spent on bugfixes and performance improvements, perfect to wrap up the year!

Enjoy!

New features and highlights¶

Network zones project feature¶

Prior to this release, network zones (DNS) were tied to features.networks, effectively requiring the use of OVN in order to get per-project DNS zones.

This has now been split up into a new features.networks.zones allowing for use of per-project zones in environment that don't use features.networks. When dealing with a shared network, that network may specify multiple zones (comma separated). Each zone will then only contain records for the project it belong to.

Complete changelog¶

Here is a complete list of all changes in this release:

Try it for yourself¶

This new LXD release is already available for you to try on our demo service.

Downloads¶

The release tarballs can be found on our download page.

Binary builds are also available for:

• Linux: snap install lxd
• MacOS: brew install lxc
• Windows: choco install lxc

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